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Monday, October 31, 2005

John Biguenet's NOLA Journal - What Have We Learned?

Oct. 30, 2005What Have We Learned?John Biguenet

It’s been two months since Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. What have we learned?

First of all, we now know that on August 29, 2005, the region suffered not one but two distinct calamities: a natural disaster that devastated the region and a manmade catastrophe that destroyed much of New Orleans. The flattened communities in Louisiana’s St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes and on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast trace the path of a fierce storm. The destruction inflicted on New Orleans when its levees collapsed, however, was not an act of God but of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. As the New Orleans Times-Picayune wrote in a front-page story confirming widely reported accounts of levee design flaws, “. . . the soil analyses of the levee and the ground beneath it show a picture of such weak support that failure of the wall under maximum loads was almost a given for the design that the Army Corps of Engineers chose to use: a single wall of steel sheet pile that was not driven to reach below the bottom of the canal.”

Second, we know that although four years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the federal government is unprepared to respond to an assault on even a relatively small U.S. city. As New Orleanians suffered and died on sweltering rooftops after the incompetence of the corps allowed massive flooding of the city, neither military support nor federal disaster aid arrived for days.

Third, we also know that the failure of the federal government to address the urgent communications needs of police officers, firefighters, and other first responders to such a large-scale disaster is only a single aspect of the more ominous failure since 9/11 to put in place a public communications system that cannot be crippled by knocking out a few centralized hubs. As Clive Thompson noted in this paper on September 18, even employees of the mayor’s office were cut off and managed to maintain communication with the outside world only by breaking into an Office Depot and stealing “phones, routers and the store’s own computer server.”

Fourth, we learned the country needs a national 911 emergency dispatch center to handle sudden crises that incapacitate a region. During the storm and after, a few cell phones continued to work, and Wi-Fi was extremely reliable in areas that had access to it. But with the city’s telephone system out — almost a certainty in a large-scale disaster — we had no centralized outside phone number or Internet site to report people in need of rescue or any other information that might have been of help to the authorities attempting to respond to the crisis.

Fifth, we have discovered how unprepared the U.S. Postal Service is to deal with a delivery backlog related to a disaster. Despite having rented a P.O. box and filed a change of address form, I was directed to another post office yesterday to pick up my mail from the last two months. When I arrived, I joined a long line of others from flooded neighborhoods who were told the postal system has no idea where our mail is, that it’s probably safe somewhere, and that we should try back in a few weeks. As a writer, I depend upon the mail, and I’m sure all the other individuals and businesses that have gone without mail for eight weeks now are facing as many personal and professional problems as I am.

Sixth, we learned that the lack of a national registry of displaced victims made it impossible after the disaster to locate doctors, landlords, colleagues, clients, friends, and family members. More than two weeks after the hurricane hit, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that only 552 of 2,430 children separated from their families by Katrina had been reunited with their caregivers.

Seventh, we continue to find that victims of a major disaster need a single Web site that lists all forms of available aid with links to simple application forms. Untold hours have been spent by people in devastated areas trying to piece together instructions on how to access help.

Eighth, we discovered how deeply generous our fellow Americans are — even if their politicians are not. The reaction of compassionate conservatives may have been typified by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who, when confronted by the staggering bill to rebuild New Orleans, opined that “It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed,” and the president’s mother, who assured the nation that many of us New Orleanians were actually better off in makeshift shelters than we were before the failed levees flooded our homes. But ordinary Americans all across the country opened their hearts (and wallets) to those of us who had been displaced. The last two months have left me enormously proud and grateful to be the countryman of such kind and truly compassionate people.

Ninth, we are learning that when you empty a city of its inhabitants and keep them from reentering for a month, many of them — perhaps as many as half — never return.

Tenth, we’ve come to understand that the difficult part of all this is only just beginning.